


So haunt thy days

by vivacephoenix



Category: Outlander (TV)
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, Missing Persons, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 13:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3570641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vivacephoenix/pseuds/vivacephoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over, but he doesn't know where to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So haunt thy days

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DKNC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DKNC/gifts).



> Moving more of my work over from tumblr: I wrote most of this back in September, maybe around episode six? Please bear in mind that this is based on the tv canon. The title comes from Keats. 
> 
> I was very intrigued by the situation Claire and Frank found themselves in at the beginning of episode one. How do you go back to normal life after a war? Especially in a time where people may not have understood how to talk about it? So this fic was born from that and from something I heard once about a friend of a relative (who worked for the CIA during the Cold War) about what it took to work in Intelligence.
> 
> For Darla!

_"Dim isolation holds the sense_   
_Of being, intimate as breathing;around,_   
_Voices, unmeasured and intense,_   
_Throb with the heart below the edge of_   
_sound._   
  
_-Variations on an Elizabethan Theme, Edgar Bowers_

* * *

 

Frank glanced up from his typewriter, stretching his neck to gaze out the window. He would have to turn on a lamp soon. The sun was already setting, though it was barely half-past two. The daylight faded so early here in the north, the ragged mountain tops blending into night. The stars, many more than he was used to, were comforting in a way. They told old stories like Orion and Sirius, Andromeda, Cassiopeia. The stories may have had despair, but at least they were complete.  
  
Fifty-one days and she’s still missing.  
  
Frank and Claire should be at Oxford by now. He had deferred his post until the spring, not citing why. With the chaos of the war ending and the country in pieces, the university had not asked. There are professors and pupils still returning from all over the globe and more who were forever lost to battles in sea, land, and sky.  
  
He doesn’t really belong in Inverness, but Frank can’t leave. This is where Claire vanished. Vanished, that’s the problem. If she had died, which had been probable for almost their entire marriage, as they had answered the call to fight a war, then he would know. But she is not dead; she’s disappeared.  
  
He stays and continues writing. He makes trips to take notes and document the ruins. (The only place he never goes is Castle Leoch because it would hurt too much to be there alone; the recollection of their morning there still smoldered.) Right now he should be in a cozy professor’s bedroom marking exams on the ramifications of Cromwell’s rule. Instead, he’s sitting alone in the parlor of a chilly inn, typing his reflections on a captain long gone from this world.  
  
He sighed and reached across the desk to refill his cup of tea. Mrs. Baird brought him a pot every afternoon while he sat and worked. Research was what Frank Randall did. And Black Jack Randall, Colum Mackenzie, these names were safe. They were not names to be memorized and then destroyed after a secret meeting with that Russian defector. (Frank obviously never knew his real name, but the man risked his life every time they met.) No matter what he does with this new knowledge of his family, publishes it, burns it, throws it off Blackfriars Bridge into the Thames, no one will get hurt.  
  
 _"I think I should know the look of blood by now."_  
  
Frank doesn’t know. Though he and Claire were both soldiers, the war for him was reports and secret plans, a cold white office in London, and constant trepidation. Would the recently-discovered Italian spy take the bait and fall into their trap? Was the agent sent to Paris tailing a suspected-spy successful in ingratiating herself with the resistance? Claire’s few stories she had told were of the doctors and other nurses she had bonded with through making rescues and saving lives in the dirt. There had been agents Frank worked with every day who would leave for an assignment one night and never return.

Sometimes Frank knew what had happened to them. Their fates were neatly typed out with a clatter of keys. Many times he never found out. Davies, Patel, Taylor, Randall, Adeyemi, Edwards, Khan, Lee, Johnson…they were all just individual files of information gained for the Crown and minds to be used.  
  
Frank’s name never came up for a mission behind the front lines. Sometimes he had ruminated over what would happen if it did. Would he then know more of what it was like for Claire? If he had gone to France or Germany, however, and died completing his mission, she would never have known the truth about his life. Oh, the army would have given her an official statement. But the fates (and choices) of Intelligence officers could not get out into the public. Even telling their families would have been a threat to security.  
  
 _"Claire Beauchamp-Randall, promise you’ll return to me._  
  
 _I will, Frank Randall, I promise.”_  
  
Frank slammed his hands down onto the typewriter and the letters jammed with a clang. Blast. He took a deep breath and slid his hands back to release the keys. The ink had smeared on the paper and Frank’s commentary on the arrest records of 1742 now ended with a smudge that vaguely looked like “kgfsals.” Oh, that was certainly a professor-level conclusion. He grinned to himself and imagined that house in Oxford again, with Claire laughing over mistakes like that. Maybe she would be curled up in a chair, reading, like that morning…  
  
No. She’s missing, but this isn’t the war. There are no enemies waiting to send them to unmarked graves, no matter how many nightmares he has.  
  
Frank tore off the paper and ripped it in half. At least he hadn’t drawn the lines of her hand. He threw the page in the bin next to the desk and went back to his tea. From the corridor he heard the laughter of other guests echo as they traipsed inside together from the cold.


End file.
